In a year defined by aggressive cyberattacks, shattered trust in traditional identity systems, and soaring enterprise complexity, a young startup named Opti has stepped forward with a bold claim: identity security can be rebuilt from the ground up with artificial intelligence at the center, not bolted on as an afterthought.

The company’s launch coincides with a $20 million seed round, one of the largest in its category, signaling the intense interest — and equally intense pressure — surrounding identity security today. Investors are betting that Opti can solve a problem that has plagued corporations for decades: understanding who has access to what, whether they should have it, and how to continuously maintain “least-privilege” security without drowning IT teams in endless manual reviews.

A New Identity Platform Built Entirely Around AI

Opti describes its platform as AI-native. Not “AI-assisted,” not “AI-enhanced,” but designed from scratch with large language models functioning as a core engine for analysis and decision-making.

According to early reports, the platform builds a full identity graph of an organization — mapping workers, accounts, roles, entitlements, applications, and permissions. From there, it automatically surfaces identity vulnerabilities, highlights risky access paths, and proposes specific action steps to fix them. The goal is not simply to alert teams to issues but to reduce a massive portion of identity maintenance work into orchestrated, automated workflows.

Identity security has historically lagged behind other security categories because it sits at the intersection of HR, IT, compliance, cloud infrastructure, and countless fragmented systems. That complexity is exactly what Opti is trying to tame.

A Founding Team That Knows the Battlefield

Opti was founded in 2024 by Barak Perelman, Mille Gandelsman, and Ido Trivizki — names that carry weight in the security industry. Perelman previously co-founded a cybersecurity company acquired by Armis; Gandelsman and Trivizki bring deep engineering and identity-infrastructure backgrounds. Their shared belief is that modern enterprises have outgrown manual identity governance.

Organizations today operate with sprawling cloud apps, temporary contractors, shadow accounts, forgotten entitlements, and increasingly automated workflows. The founders argue that the old model — tickets, spreadsheets, quarterly reviews — is collapsing under its own weight.

Why Identity Security Is Suddenly Receiving Massive Attention

The funding behind Opti is not accidental. The startup is backed by YL Ventures, Mayfield Fund, and Hetz Ventures, along with several other global investors and notable figures in cybersecurity. The size of the seed round alone underscores how urgently companies want solutions to identity risk, which has become the No.1 target in many cyber intrusions.

Every breach headline — from ransomware attacks to cloud data exposures — has the same root question: How did someone get access they shouldn’t have had?
This is the identity crisis Opti is stepping into.

What Makes Opti Different

Opti’s strategy hinges on three ideas that separate it from legacy identity governance platforms:

1. AI handles the analysis, not humans.

Instead of analysts combing through thousands of permissions, the system digests the entire organization’s access landscape and flags misconfigurations automatically.

2. Recommendations become automated actions.

IT and security teams spend enormous time approving requests, removing access, or verifying permissions. Opti wants to turn these into orchestrated, reviewable workflows powered by AI.
The company claims it can shrink weeks of identity cleanup into minutes.

3. Integration without ripping out existing systems.

Reports state that Opti plugs into standard identity sources — HR systems, IT service platforms, cloud identity providers, and more — without requiring a complete overhaul of an organization’s architecture.

This last point is crucial: enterprises rarely adopt platforms that force disruptive migrations. Opti is positioning itself as an overlay, not a replacement.

The Market Opti Is Walking Into

The identity security sector has begun shifting away from traditional identity governance tools — often seen as slow, procedural, and ill-suited for the pace of modern cloud adoption.
Companies now demand real-time intelligence, continuous monitoring, adaptive access decisions, and the ability to detect identity-based attack paths before attackers exploit them.

AI arrived exactly when the industry needed a reset.
Opti is among the first wave of companies attempting to use it not as a cosmetic add-on but as the structural foundation of the entire product.

Can Opti Deliver?

With a seed round this size, expectations are high. Opti now carries the responsibility of proving three things:

1. Its AI can operate safely and reliably in highly sensitive identity environments.
   If the system incorrectly revokes or grants access, the fallout could be enormous.

2. Its automations must work across the messy, real-world systems used by large enterprises.
   No two organizations have the same identity infrastructure.

3. It must scale.
   Identity environments grow fast — cloud accounts, service identities, machine identities, shadow accounts.
   A modern platform must not only keep up but stay one step ahead.

If Opti succeeds, it won’t just simplify identity management — it could reshape how enterprises think about access, governance, and risk altogether.

A Turning Point for Identity Security

The timing of Opti’s launch feels deliberate. Organizations are now operating in a security environment where access controls determine everything: the blast radius of a breach, regulatory risk, insider threats, and the pace of internal operations.

Identity is no longer an administrative function. It’s the core of cybersecurity.
What Opti is attempting — a fully automated, adaptive identity platform built on AI — marks a shift that many experts have predicted but few companies have yet achieved.

The next year will determine whether Opti becomes another promising idea or the company that finally modernized identity governance for the AI era.